Cooking up half a loaf is safer than nothing if it avoids being sliced by the opposition. Hence Kathleen Wynne’s transitory tone on transit.

Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne is flanked by Toronto Transit Commission chair Maria Augimeri and Minister of Infrastructure Glen Murray Monday as they ride the subway while en route to Wynne's speech at the Toronto Region Board of Trade in Toronto.

Last year, fresh from winning the Liberal leadership, Wynne gave a blue-sky talk as if the sky were the limit — musing about taxes and tolls to help bankroll a $40-billion blueprint for the GTA and Hamilton. Back then, she commiserated with her business audience about the unwillingness of other parties to do the heavy lifting.

“Some politicians have made a short-sighted decision to avoid real solutions,” Wynne said at the time. “Parties do their polling and they don’t see easy answers; they don’t see easy wins.”

It’s true that the opposition Tories and New Democrats were reading the warning signs in the polls. Now, it turns out, the Liberals can read, too.

Last year, Wynne told her audience that Los Angeles had supported a higher sales tax for transit expansion. And she described how Stockholm’s citizens voted for tolls to reduce congestion in their city.

Brimming with confidence, Wynne mused aloud that “good policy and public opinion are intersecting . . . we see this kind of culture shift is already happening in Ontario.”

Not so fast on rapid transit. The polls still show that while people like mass transit, they massively dislike paying for it.

Now, the realities of minority government have forced the Liberals to change course on their transit plan. It’s not just the risk of a budget defeat but the spectre of a spring election — in which she’d be asking voters to approve tax hikes — that gave the premier pause.

In today’s climate, it’s hard for any politician to sell tax increases, let alone tolls on existing roads. That’s why Tory Leader Tim Hudak and the NDP’s Andrea Horwath are united in their opposition to both.

The opposition’s common front of convenience has made it politically impossible for the Liberals to go out on a limb on new taxes or tolls. It’s also a reflection of Wynne’s failure to move public opinion on this issue.

Recognizing that resistance, and taking stock of the NDP’s declared warnings against gas taxes or other “middle class” hikes, Wynne opted for a workaround: In her Monday speech to the Board of Trade, she confirmed the Liberals will reallocate part of the existing gas tax to specially dedicated transit and transportation funds.

To replace that money, which previously went to general revenues but will now be earmarked for transit, Wynne will have to find new sources of funding. The May budget will likely include a new surtax on people earning more than $150,000 a year — exempting the large numbers of middle-class voters that the NDP was declaring off limits.

By avoiding the trap set by Horwath, Wynne has made it harder for the NDP to oppose her spring budget. Even so, with the gas-plant boondoggle refusing to die, Horwath may yet decide (or feel pressured) to trigger an election.

If there is to be a spring campaign, the NDP may have done Wynne a favour by forcing her to back off the broader measures she was considering a year ago. While taxes and tolls are sound public policy, they are a hard sell at election time.

Wynne abandoned the idea months ago, but opposition taunting and goading put her on the defensive. She even convened a news conference last month to publicly proclaim that there would be no increase in gas taxes or the HST, and repeated her vow Monday.

After one year of minority government, facing a possible budget defeat and election challenge, Wynne could soon have a chance to test out her transit ideas on the campaign trail. Even if she’s offering only half a loaf, at least she will have tried — which is the one overarching condition she set for herself a year ago:

“I don’t want some future premier to stand here in 50 years talking about how great it would have been if only someone had taken action in 2013,” she told her audience back then.

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